Monday, March 25, 2013

Mark Nepo's "Fire Without Witness" is an epic poem that centers on Michelangelo as he paints The Sistine Ceiling. While painting the different panels, he reveals stories of his time, his life, and through his dreams, the future. As the panels are painted, the prophets and sibyls and objects of Creation come alive, unknown to Michelangelo, and tell their stories. The poem presents two skewed realities, and while at times the Biblical and mythic voices see Michelangelo, they never reach his awareness.

About his work, Nepo says "It took me ten years to write the poem, which seems now a painting itself. It seems a vision of that rim between the human and the infinite, where our body of sense almost leaves us, than settles and hardens into what we are. And when dealing with the infinite, all comes down to one encompassing, unnamable source, one fire without witness. As Michelangelo himself put it, “What is in the very center is always free.”From Part III: Michelangelo stalls on the scaffold to recall how he first saw the Pieta, complete, in the unquarried marble at Carrara."Someday, I'll carve a Venus, bunchingthe warm breasts high, the silk legs closed,the most perfect virgin, with everythingto give, and no desire.O what if Heaven is as cold.The things I love most wait hunchedin the white Carrara grove, neverwhere the workmen mutter. Like fish,the statues scatter from the lines.I hunt alone, away from the crews,and the statues pull back, deepin the thick of the mountain.They hold still as the stone,and some arch themselvesalong the inner faults,dreaming slowlynot to be found.

Despite this fierce photo, Schuyler's readings of his poems is incredibly gentle. He, Ashbery, O'Hara and Koch were part of a New York group of poets, who retreated to the Hamptons in summer and collaborated with painters Mitchell, Larry Rivers, Jane Freulicher, Nell Blaine, and Grace Hartigan.

Submit Your Work

We will consider all poems or paintings that incorporate poems as long as you own the rights. Please review blog entries to see the format and content we like. Then email your work with a short bio to ekblog2013@aol.com.